cljgrapht

An idiomatic Clojure graph library backed by JGraphT: build graphs over plain Clojure values and run JGraphT's fast, mature algorithm catalog, getting plain Clojure data back.

Stack

Why

Graph work is the textbook case where Python's networkx is slow: it's pure Python, and graph algorithms are irregular and pointer-chasing, so they never vectorize into a C core the way numpy workloads do. On the JVM the same algorithms run on JIT-compiled code with real threads.

loom and ubergraph are the established pure-Clojure graph libraries, and if they cover your needs they're a great fit. cljgrapht takes a different tack: instead of implementing algorithms in Clojure, it wraps JGraphT, so you get its large, actively-developed algorithm catalog (shortest paths, centrality, flow, matching, coloring, isomorphism, and more) running on the JVM, behind a Clojure-shaped API. Reach for it when you want an algorithm the pure-Clojure libraries don't ship, or JGraphT's performance on large graphs. Vertices are any Clojure value; results come back as vectors, sets, and maps.

This is a performance wrapper, not a persistent data structure: graphs are JGraphT's native mutable objects. Constructors and mutators return the graph for threading, but they mutate in place.

Requires JDK 11+ (JGraphT 1.5.x).

Installation

Leiningen (project.clj):

[net.clojars.savya/cljgrapht "0.1.4"]

tools.deps (deps.edn):

net.clojars.savya/cljgrapht {:mvn/version "0.1.4"}

Usage

(require '[cljgrapht.core :as g]
         '[cljgrapht.algo :as a])

;; Build a weighted directed graph from edge data.
(def road
  (g/weighted-digraph [[:a :b 1.0] [:a :c 4.0] [:b :c 1.0] [:c :d 1.0]]))

;; Cheapest route, as Clojure data.
(a/shortest-path road :a :d)
;; => {:path [:a :b :c :d] :weight 3.0}

;; Undirected social graph; who is most central?
(def social (g/graph [[:alice :bob] [:bob :carol] [:bob :dave] [:carol :dave]]))

(a/betweenness-centrality social)
;; => {:alice 0.0 :bob 2.0 :carol 0.0 :dave 0.0}

;; Dependency graph: order tasks, or detect a cycle.
(def deps (g/digraph [[:compile :test] [:compile :package] [:test :deploy]
                      [:package :deploy]]))

(a/topological-sort deps) ;; => [:compile :test :package :deploy]
(a/cycle? deps)           ;; => false

What's in cljgrapht.algo

• Shortest paths: shortest-path, shortest-path-length, all-pairs-shortest-path-length
• Connectivity: connected-components, strongly-connected-components
• Ordering & cycles: topological-sort, cycle?, vertices-on-cycles
• Spanning: minimum-spanning-tree
• Centrality: betweenness-centrality, closeness-centrality, pagerank

Performance

cljgrapht runs JGraphT's JIT-compiled Java algorithms instead of implementing them in Clojure, so it's substantially faster on non-trivial graphs. Random weighted digraphs, criterium quick-bench, Clojure 1.12.5 / JDK 17, mean time, graph construction excluded from the algorithm rows. Source: bench/bench.clj.

2,000 vertices / ~10k edges

Task	loom 1.0.2	ubergraph 0.9.0	cljgrapht
Build from edge list	201 ms	27 ms	4.7 ms
Weighted shortest path (Dijkstra)	7.3 ms	5.2 ms	0.27 ms
Connected components	6.0 ms	22 ms	1.9 ms

10,000 vertices / ~50k edges

Task	loom 1.0.2	ubergraph 0.9.0	cljgrapht
Build from edge list	963 ms	182 ms	27 ms
Weighted shortest path (Dijkstra)	20 ms	8.1 ms	1.1 ms
Connected components	28 ms	95 ms	13 ms

This is the expected tradeoff of a native-Java engine, not a knock on loom or ubergraph: both are pure-Clojure libraries with persistent, immutable graphs, which cljgrapht gives up for speed. Reach for cljgrapht when graph size or algorithm depth is the constraint.

License

Copyright © 2026 Savyasachi

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License 2.0, the same license JGraphT is available under.